The Real Story of Stuxnet

It soon became clear, in the code itself as well as from field reports, that Stuxnet had been specifically designed to subvert Siemens systems running centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program. The Kaspersky analysts then realized that financial gain had not been the objective. It was a politically motivated attack. “At that point there was no doubt that this was nation-state sponsored,” Schouwenberg says. This phenomenon caught most computer-security specialists by surprise. “We’re all engineers here; we look at code,” says Symantec’s O’Murchu. “This was the first real threat we’ve seen where it had real-world political ramifications. That was something we had to come to terms with.”